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40 TEACHER JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony
Wagner, researchers at Stanford University,
say media multi-tasking impairs cognitive
control. They put 100 students, half of them
heavy media multi-taskers and half of them
not -- through a series of three tests. Their
results showed that heavy media multi-task-
ers are more susceptible to interference from
irrelevant environmental stimuli and from
irrelevant representations in memory, and
performed worse on a test of task-switching
ability.
In the first experiment, the heavy and
light multi-taskers were shown sets of two
red rectangles alone or su rrounded by two,
four or six blue rectangles. Each configura-
tion was flashed twice, and the participants
had to determine whether the two red rec-
tangles in the second frame were in a differ-
ent position than in the first frame.
They were told to ignore the blue rectan-
gles. While the light multi-taskers had no
problem doing that, the heavy multi-taskers
were constantly distracted by the irrelevant
blue images.
Ophir, Nass and Wagner figured that may
have meant the heavy multi-taskers couldn't
ignore things, perhaps because they were
better at storing and organising informa-
tion. Their second experiment proved that
theory wrong. The heavy multi-taskers were
shown sequences of alphabetical letters, and
did a lousy job at remembering when a letter
was making a repeat appearance, unlike the
light multi-taskers. Says Ophir, 'The high
multi-taskers were doing worse and worse
the further they went along because they
kept seeing more letters and had difficulty
keeping them sorted in their brains.'
Okay, heavy multi-taskers struggle to fil-
ter out irrelevant information or remember,
but maybe they're able to switch from one
thing to another faster and better than any-
one else. To find out, the Stanford research-
ers conducted a third experiment. Test sub-
jects were shown images of letters and digits
at the same time and instructed to pay atten-
tion to digits to determine whether they were
even or odd, then to concentrate on letters
to determine whether they were vowels or
consonants. Again, the heavy multi-taskers
underperformed the light multi-taskers.
'They couldn't help thinking about the
task they weren't doing,' says Ophir. 'The
high multi-taskers are always drawing from
all the information in front of them. They
can't keep things separate in their minds.'
As Wagner explains, 'When they're in sit-
uations where there are multiple sources of
information coming from the external world
or emerging out of memory, they're not able
to filter out what's not relevant to their cu r-
rent goal. Thatfailure tofilter means they're
slowed dow n by that irrelevant information.'
A study of video gamers by Kira Bailey,
Robert West and Craig Anderson from
Iowa State University confirms the Stanford
research. Bailey, West and Anderson found
that video game players who play for around
40 hours a week have more difficulty stay-
ing focused on tasks requiring long periods
of attention than those who play video
games for a few hours a week.
Using electroencephalography or EEG,
the researchers measured electrical activity in
the brains of 51 undergraduate males, nearly
evenly divided between those who reported
playing fewer than a couple of hou rs of video
games a week and those who played video
games for an average of 43 hours a week.
They found that high-volume players of
action video games that require players to
respond quickly to rapidly-changing stimuli
find proactive cognitive control more diffi-
cult to maintain than do their low-volu me
counterparts. Put simply, high-volume play-
ers struggle to process information in the
face of distraction. When it comes to reactive
cognitive control, mind you, Bailey, West and
Anderson found no difference between the
high- and low-volume gamers, but, they con-
clude, 'Our results may serve to constrain the
claims ofsome scholars, game manufacturers
and journalists who have suggested that play-
ing action video games "improves attention."'
'The sort of real world effect that you
might be seeing is that these are individuals
who would really have difficulty trying to
maintain their attention independently over
time,' explains West, an associate professor
According to new
research, the sundry
media multi-tasking
habits of our students
have another and
altogether more subtle
impact: they reduce
students' ability to pay
attention.